My sister and I bought our mom a smart phone for her birthday in September. Since she is older, we got the Samsung Galaxy Note, thinking with the really large screen she would be able to see it much easier than a normal smart phone.

She didn’t mess with it too much at first. She’s terrified of all things electronic. Slowly, over the past few months she has gotten more and more brave with it.

I will admit when she asked me to start downloading games for her to play I was a little skeptical. I gave her “Trivia Crack” first. In the beginning, she loved it. A week later she informed me she was over it.

“This game just takes too long. I am constantly waiting for people to take their turn. I deleted it today.”

She deleted it? Hell, I had no idea she would even begin to know how to delete an app.

Next up, “Slotmania”.

“Chanin, they want money from me! It’s asking me to buy coins! I am not putting my credit card information into a phone for shit sake!” And that got deleted as well.

Then I downloaded, “Candy Crush”. I thought this was it. Every person I know was addicted to it for a small amount of time…even myself. This she will like. She plays alone, no waiting involved and I will be off the hook for finding her a game.

“This game is just dumb. I don’t care about matching colors. This just won’t be a challenge at all.”

Oh, how wrong she is about that. There were times when I would have given up a kidney to get past a level on that Candy Crush.

As a last resort, I downloaded “Words with Friends” for her. She has always been a fan of Scrabble, so I told her it is just like it. I helped her play her first word on the board and left her to it.

Two days went by and I got a phone call.

“This woman I’m playing with is cheating! You know how much I hate cheaters!”

My mind flashed back to a friendly game of Scrabble involving my family and a friend who was in town visiting. She and my mom got into a massive argument over the word, “poi”. My friend told her she couldn’t use it because it was a foreign word and my mom argued back that in fact, it was not. They got out a dictionary and at one point I thought they might come to blows or at least scratch each other’s eyes out. It was UGLY. So ugly, that there is still resentment and anger between them over this one evening of Scrabble.

Now, you or I would just stop playing with the random online Words with Friends person. But noooooooooooooooooooooo, my mom sends the woman a message telling her she needs to read the rules, because she is not playing correctly. That of course, got the woman all upset and she wrote back saying, ” I have played this game for years and I do not cheat. I know the rules.”

Later in the afternoon, Mom calls again to tell me they continue to argue about the cheating and pretty soon she might need me to come up with some bail money because she isn’t going to tolerate it much longer.